On April 3rd, the first-ever Civic Data Challenge was launched at the Data 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. It’s a project of NCoC (the National Conference on Citizenship) to bring new eyes, new minds, new findings, and new skill sets to the field of civic health. The Civic Data Challenge has just announced a new with Kaggle. Kaggle will offer one of the Challenge winners the opportunity to expand upon their winning insights by hosting a competition on Kaggle - ...

For the first of our interviews with top finishers in the Hewlett Automated Essay Scoring Challenge, we catch up with 6th place finisher and polymath Martin O'Leary (@mewo2). You can also check out his blog at http://mewo2.github.com/ What was your background prior to entering this challenge? I'm a mathematician turned glaciologist, working as a research fellow at the University of Michigan. I've been involved with Kaggle for about a year now, and have had a few good finishes. I have ...

Here at No Free Hunch, we often feature posts by the winners of past Kaggle competitions. These are a great source of advice and give one something to shoot for, but what about the rest of us who didn’t finish in the money. Have we learned anything of value by seeing our models get trounced by the likes of Opera Solutions and Market Makers? I would argue that we do. Most people wouldn’t admit in a public forum that their ...

Washington, D.C. – A British particle physicist and sports enthusiast, a data analyst for the National Weather Service in Washington, D.C., and a graduate student from Germany won the $60,000 first prize in a competition to design innovative software to help teachers and school systems assess their students’ writing. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation sponsored the contest and awarded $100,000 to the top three research teams – none of whom have a background in education...[The winning team's] collaborative effort ...

We catch up with Alfonso Nieto-Castanon, the winner of Round 1 of the CHALEARN Gesture Challenge. This fascinating series of 4 competitions revolves around gesture and sign language recognition using a Microsoft Kinect camera. A must-read for anyone planning to throw their hat in the ring for CHALEARN Round 2. What was your background prior to entering this challenge? My background is on computational neuroscience (Ph.D. Cognitive and Neural Systems, Boston University) and engineering (B.S./M.S. Telecommunication Engineering, Universidad de Valladolid). ...

In November 2010, Kaggle ran the RTA Freeway Travel Time Prediction Challenge for the government of New South Wales. This competition required participants to predict travel time on Sydney's M4 freeway from past travel time observations (fun fact: did you know that traffic jams can propagate forwards as well as back?). Kaggler Jose Gonzalez, who is currently finishing his Ph.D. in Computer Science at CMU, was one of the winners of the competition. Jose was recently contacted by Aneesh Chopra, ...

Reprinted with permission from Martin O'Leary. Check out his github blog Cold Hard Facts to see what else he has been up to recently (hint: Million Song Dataset) Yesterday was the EMC Data Science Global Hackathon, a 24-hour predictive modelling competition, hosted by Kaggle. The event was held at about a dozen locations globally, but a large number of competitors (including myself) entered remotely, from the comfort of their own coding caves. I finished in fourth place globally, knocked out ...

The EMC Data Science Global Hackathon prize was awarded to James Petterson. Check out his webpage for a more detailed description and the source code: http://users.cecs.anu.edu.au/~jpetterson/ What was your background prior to entering this challenge? I am currently finishing my PhD in machine learning at ANU. Before that I worked as a software engineer for the telecom industry for many years. What made you decide to enter? The challenge of kaggle competitions always attracted me - I took part in ...

Wayne Zhang, the winner of the ICFHR 2012 - Arabic Writer Identification Competition shares his thoughts on pushing for the frontiers in hand-writing recognition. What was your background prior to entering this challenge? I'm pursuing my PhD in pattern recognition and machine learning. I have interests in many problems of this field, such as classification, clustering, semi-supervised learning and generative models. What made you decide to enter? To test my knowledge on real-world problems, to compete with smart people, and ...

Our new Kaggle developer, Adam Kennedy, introduces the new Kaggle Wiki: The Kaggle Public Wiki launches today in Beta. We have built it from the ground up to support the odd mix of science, math and code that makes our sport unique. Since arriving at Kaggle, my main task has been to put together a suitable long-term home for everything the Kaggle community knows about competitive data science. The Kaggle forums are full of great nuggets of advice for competitive ...

We catch up with Ben Hamner, a data scientist at Kaggle, after he won Kaggle's Air Quality Prediction Hackathon. As a Kaggle employee, he is ineligible for prizes. What was your background prior to entering this challenge? I graduated from Duke University in 2010 with a bachelors in biomedical engineering, electrical and computer engineering, and mathematics. For the next year, I applied machine learning to improve non-invasive brain-computer interfaces as a Whitaker Fellow at EPFL. On the side, I participated ...